BOB HART WWllThe odyssey of a “Battling Buzzard” “Anything worth dying for ... is certainly worth living for.” –Joseph Heller, Catch-22 t was August 15, 1944, D-Day for Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France. Fifteen-hundred feet above a drop zone Ishrouded in fog, the wind buffeted Bob Hart’s helmet the instant before he plunged into the unknown at 4:35 a.m. “As soon as you got to the doorway all you saw was white. Most of us figured we were jumping over the Mediterranean. And for a split second all you could think was ‘I got 120 pounds of gear on me. What’s going to happen when I land?’ ” But now he was falling. “A thousand and one,” Hart said to himself as another paratrooper sprang from the doorway of the lumbering C-47. “A thousand and two. “A thousand and…” Hart’s body harness jerked taut reassuringly as the primary parachute billowed. Had he got past “three” he would have yanked the ripcord for the reserve chute bundled on his chest. The business about paratroopers yelling “Geronimo!” was mostly bravado that got old in a hurry after jump school. Paratroopers prepare for a practice jump from a C-47. Bob Hart collection 2 Bob Hart Descending in the eerie whiteness, the 20-year-old machine gunner from Tacoma fleetingly remembered how he and a buddy had signed up for the paratroopers 16 months earlier at Fort Lewis, reasoning they wouldn’t have to do much walking. Fat chance. After Hart landed hard in a farmer’s field in the foothills above the Côte d’Azur, he ended up tramping 50 miles through hostile countryside on an aching foot that turned out to be broken. The parachute bundle containing his machine gun was never found, and one of the battalion’s officers was rendered hors de combat on landing, sustaining a stake up his butt. Only about 20 percent of the U.S. Army’s 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team landed within two miles of the drop zone. And the platoon’s radio Bob in 1945. Bob Hart collection man didn’t bring the battery. Good morning, World War Two! For days like that, the GI’s invented an acronym that became part of the American lexicon: SNAFU (Situation Normal All F***** Up. Or, in polite company, “All Fouled Up”). “Luckily, we were over dry land after all, but the parachute’s coming down over my head because there wasn’t much wind, and I’m trying to assemble the two pieces of my M-1.” Hart chuckles as he pantomimes struggling with his rifle while draped in 28 feet of nylon. When he emerged into what was literally the fog of war, he heard someone nearby. “I said the first part of our password—‘Liberty’ or something like that. You were supposed to answer with ‘France.’ And very shakily I heard the right answer. It was Lt. Carl Starkey, the toughest guy in the outfit. Of all the people in the world, he was the guy I’d rather be with in this situation. And he was just as jittery The Odyssey of a “Battling Buzzard” 3 as I was. We spent the next hour looking for my machine gun bundle. Finally, I said to myself, ‘Well, I don’t have to carry that goddamn machine gun any more!’ Thirty pounds of dead weight. “It took us three hours to find my assistant gunner and the ammo bearer. We trudged down the road leading to the crossroads village of Les Arcs and discovered that the gunner from the Second Squad has broken his back. His machine gun is there beside him in the ditch. So now I have a machine gun again.” He’d need it. Though the last large-scale night jump of World War II was off to a bumpy start, the “Battling Buzzards” of the 517th—some of the fittest, most resourceful soldiers in the annals of warfare—did what they were trained to do: regroup, improvise as needed and engage the enemy. They proceeded to throw the Germans “into a state of chaos,” repulsed a counterattack and dug in as artillery duels “echoed through the valleys of the Maritime Alps,” their proud colonel wrote afterward. “There’s not many of us left who remember that,” Hart says, leafing through a souvenir booklet marked “Passed by censors for mailing home.” Hart’s wise and witty wife of 69 years, Kathleen (“Kath”), asked the historian if he’d like a toasted cheese sandwich, noting, “Bob likes baloney on his.” Bob shoots her a wink. Here’s something important you should know about Bob: There’s mischief but not much baloney in his war stories. In 1944, he was the quintessential American GI, a genuinely brave, blue-eyed kid striving to stay sane—and alive—in a world gone horrifically mad. Bob tells the sort of war stories you seldom hear. Some are hilarious, such as the perils of second-hand sleeping bags and the card-shark priest who dispensed communion before emptying your wallet. Many are heartbreaking: A crumpled glider filled with dead GI’s; a squad of buddies killed by Friendly Fire. “You see stuff like that and you wonder how you can go on,” Hart says, shaking his head. “You felt bad, but there wouldn’t have been an Army in Europe if you didn’t think ‘It’s not going to be me.’ That’s why 4 Bob Hart they like 18-year-olds as soldiers. You get up to 25 and you start thinking, ‘Hey, they’re trying to kill me!’ ” They were definitely trying to kill him when the 517th made it to Belgium in the dead of winter, 1944-45. Feet frozen, Hart was evacuated during the horrific Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last-gasp gamble to repulse the advancing Allies. Hart was awarded a Purple Heart for his broken foot and the Bronze Star for his role in the combat team’s assorted acts of heroism. Nearly 70 years later, he received a handsome medal—the Legion of Honor—from a grateful France. “It’s for not doing anything special other than surviving World War II in France,” Bob shrugs, handing over the impressive decoration. “It’s the only medal I’ve ever seen that’s the same on both sides. Pretty neat. Napoleon designed it. I like the French. Kath went to Europe two years ago on a cruise. I almost went back twice, but then De Gaulle made me mad twice. So I wouldn’t go.” You should have a clear picture of Bob Hart by now. He lives at serene Lake Limerick a few miles from Shelton in Mason County and has many friends and admirers, especially at the Saints’ Pantry Food Bank where he was for years a dedicated volunteer. Bob, unfortunately, is also a member of a club with dwindling membership. What he said when the historian called—“You’d better hurry”—sums up the urgency of compiling the oral histories of World War II veterans. Bob, happily, was overstating things. He has rebounded from a couple of nasty falls. The VA has finally agreed to pay for an acupuncturist for his aching back. He also developed arthritis around the bone he broke in his left foot. Bob buys Bengay in bulk. At 93, he regrets that his freewheeling motorcycling days are over. The flip side, he observes, is that most people his age “are either dead or a lot worse off.” Hart has out-lived all but a handful of his fellow paratroopers. “You’re also lucky that you have all your marbles,” the historian said. “No,” Bob said mischievously. “I’ve lost three. The Odyssey of a “Battling Buzzard” 5 But I still have the aggie”—his shooter. “That was always my lousiest game—marbles.” Then the grin receded. “The kid who always beat me all through grade school was wounded at the battle of Anzio. I wrote a letter to him while he was in the hospital. I was on the Bulge when I received it back marked ‘deceased.’ ” Here’s the rest of the story, including how Bob got to the Bulge, the largest battle in the history of the U.S. Army, and lived to tell about it: Three of the four branches of his family tree are Germanic. His father’s parents and his mother’s father arrived in America during the first half of the 19th Century, together with nearly a million other Germans. That Bob Hart’s job during World War II was “to kill Krauts,” as he puts it, doesn’t strike him as ironic because it boiled down to democracy vs. dictatorships, not the German people. When you plug a 93-year-old into Ancestry.com, it’s a time machine to a rustic world fraught with hard knocks. Bob’s dad, William Hart, had a falling out with his stoic farmer folks in Wisconsin and left home when he was 13. Bill bounced around the West, tending bar and working for the Northern Pacific railroad. Around 1900 he landed in Billings, Montana, and met Inez Barkdoll, an industrious young woman whose girlhood was spent near the Custer battlefield at the Little Bighorn. Bob grew up hearing that Calamity Jane, the celebrated frontierswoman, was a frequent Barkdoll houseguest, though her personal hygiene left a lot to be desired. The Harts lost their first child, a daughter named Frances, to mastoiditis in 1919 when she was 9. Before the advent of antibiotics, the agonizing middle ear infection was one of the leading causes of childhood deaths.